NGP is a Dev's dream: Sony details NGP strategies at private UK event

[Zlejedi]

HappySqurriel said:

Scoobes said:

HappySqurriel said:

Chibi.V.29 said:

Scoobes said:

Chibi.V.29 said:

Wooow O_O Thats  crazy amount of praise from the developers. If in NGP gets this kind of support everywhere we may just have found ourselves a winner.

Yeah, the only worry is (initially at least) we may see a lot of PS3 ports rather than new games. However, this could also be considerred a plus if they manage the cloud storage thing.

Yeah im interested to see how it goes ^^ I just hope that sony control just how many games get ported etc. Dont want to end up with 100 shovel ware games a day :/

I actually doubt we will see many PS3 ports initially ...

If games are being sold on flash memory, the cost of a large enough game card to hold most HD console games would translate into much higher game prices.

Not neccessarily. Most PS3 games are already multiplat and manage to fit on the 6.8Gb of a 360 DVD. With extra compression, slightly lower resolution art due to the small screen and remembering that the cost of ROM memory (not read/write flash) is actually quite cheap, especially for Sony who mass produce, then ports are actually relatively cheap and easy.

Games released to the XBox 360 already are taking full advantage of compression, and I doubt significant gains could be made without adding noticeable graphical artefacts in the game; and you can downgrade the graphical assets to save space, but to get significant gains you would start to notice the quality reduction. While we could argue about the specifics, at some point the problems introduced from reducing the data-footprint of a game would undermine the entire point of producing a graphically impressive system.

With that said, memory is getting inexpensive but it isn't that cheap ... I could be wrong but I suspect that, while 4GB and 8GB game cards may be possible from launch, I doubt that the game cards that have enough capacity to do a straight port of a HD console game would be inexpensive enough to sell a game for the standard game prices without hurting the developer's margins on these games. This might not prevent Sony from porting first party games, because the margins of first part games are better (because of licensing fees) and they can justify any reduced revenue as platform building, but third party publishers are probably not as willing to cut into their margins or sell games for higher fees.

 

Obviously, this doesn't mean that these games won't eventually find their way to the NGP; but I see it as being something that will (probably) not be that common until memory prices are reduced further.

Don't forget that flash based medium doesn't need duplication of data on discs due to almost instant seeking times while big parts of BR discs for ps3 are wasted on this to reduce loading speed.

Also there's a huge diffrence beetween SD card and cartridge:

SD card must survive few hundreds writes to each cell (and in case of smaller nands problems of losing data over time might arrise)  while game cartridge is read only and must keep your data for all eternity.